1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a display screen processing apparatus and a storage medium containing therein a program for controlling the display screen processing apparatus. More particularly, the invention relates to a display screen processing apparatus and a storage medium containing therein a program for controlling the display screen processing apparatus, which is adapted to divide one display information object into a plurality of partial display information objects on the basis of attribute information embedded in the display information object and to display on a greater scale a partial display information object designated in an icon on the entire display screen.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In recent years, the widespread use of personal computers and information terminals, the extension of communication facilities and the penetration of the Internet and PC communications have provided users with opportunities to browse electric documents in various ways. Particularly, the Worldwide Web (WWW) system of the Internet features an excellent hypertext browsing function. Therefore, the number of providers that provide various services on the WWW servers has recently been increasing.
In this connection, the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) for composition of hypertexts on the WWW system has constantly been revised and the WWW browser function has been extended. For example, a split screen display method has been developed which is adapted to integrally display a plurality of display information objects on a plurality of display areas of a display screen on the WWW browser with the use of split frames. With this method, a greater number of WWW servers (home page providers) provide hypertexts which are excellent in the browsability and operability.
As a prior art, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. Hei 5(1993)-204369 proposes a partial image zoom-in method which provides a display screen splitting function. In this method, a display screen is divided into a plurality of display areas, and a display area selected from the plurality of display areas by a user is zoomed in to display on a greater scale an image previously formed in the selected display area. Thus, the user can smoothly follow the zoom-in of the selected display area by his eyes and, therefore, it is easy to find a correspondence between the images before and after the zoom-in of the display area.
Further, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. Sho 61(1986)-296384 proposes a display screen controlling apparatus which is adapted to divide a display screen into a plurality of split screen areas and to display a selected one of the plural split screen areas on the entire display screen by a simple operation.
However, the aforesaid split screen displaying method employing the split frames, the method disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. Hei 5(1993)-204369 and the apparatus disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. Sho 61(1986)-296384 are disadvantageous in that, particularly in the case of a small size display screen, the division of the display screen according to a certain splitting format results in undesirably small split display areas thereby to deteriorate the operability.
Further, the method disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. Hei 5(1993)-204369 is disadvantageous in that it is difficult to find where the enlarged image in the split display area (which is a part of the original image) is previously located in the original image. The apparatus disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. Sho 61(1986)-296384 is disadvantageous in that split display areas cannot repeatedly be switched to be selectively displayed on the entire display screen, and in that the display screen configuration cannot optionally be changed for split display of a hypertext.